You Never Can Tell is like going to the dentist, but crazier

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Bernard Shaw really tempted fate (and critics) by beginning You Never Can Tell with a scene of a dentist pulling teeth, and you could say the Shaw Festival is doing the same by opening their 54th season with this 1897 comedy.

In Shaw's conception, however, Valentine's seaside dentist office is as magic and transformative a place as one of Shakespeare's green worlds. It's a place where you might lose a tooth, but gain a family member; a place where love is suddenly sparked by a snort of nitrous oxide, rather than a drop of Puck's potion in the eyes.

For his production of You Never Can Tell, the seventh in the Shaw Festival's history, director Jim Mezon teases out these Shakespearean aspects of the comedy – turning it into a lighter, loonier twist on The Tempest.

Here, Prospero's island is Great Britain itself, and it's the exiled rather than the exilers who crash on it.

The Clandon clan has returned to England's shores after 18 years in Portugal – and are holidaying at a candy-coloured seaside resort deliciously designed by Leslie Frankish. (Her go-go-gadget props are a particular pleasure to watch in action.)

Mrs. Lanfrey Clandon (Tara Rosling), despite being an authoress of enlightened parenting pamphlets, has never told her three children who their father is. And while daughter Gloria (Julia Course) and twins Dolly and Philip (Jennifer Dzialoszynski and Stephen Jackman-Torkoff) are now demanding to know, mom is keeping mum.

Naturally, however, the long-lost paterfamilias is living in this very same seaside town, in the form of a red-faced and irritable landlord named Mr. Crampton (Patrick McManus).

And it's at his tenant Valentine's office, where the children run into him – Crampton is next to have a tooth extracted after Dolly. His children unknowingly invite him to lunch – along with the dentist himself (Gray Powell), who has suddenly become smitten with Gloria.

You Never Can Tell chronicles the aftermath of this accidental family reunion. Helping move reconciliation along is an impossibly perfect waiter named Walter (a restrained Peter Millard), whom Dolly renames William because he looks "like the bust of Shakespeare in Stratford Church."

Walter/William functions as the Prospero of Mezon's production – twanging Rule Britannia on a kazoo, while projections of children playing on the beach and a shipwreck up are shown on a screen behind him before the first scene begins. Later, his own estranged son Bohun (Jeff Meadows, dressed up a beturbaned swami with giant eyebrows) appears to help stage-manage the conclusion.

In his review of The Importance of Being Earnest, Shaw wrote that "unless a comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening."

Mezon's production of You Never Can Tell doesn't entirely live up to Shaw's own expectation. Most of the emotional movement in the play is inexplicable, and you just have to go along with it in the spirit of Shakespearean sea-changes.

There is an exception – with genuine feeling to be found in the tentative reconciliation between Crampton and his eldest daughter Gloria.

McManus gives a growling, prideful performance, but by pushing everyone away so violently and self-destructively, he arouses sympathy like a trapped bear. Course, also, is quite moving in Gloria's interactions with her father, desperately trying to be unsentimental. "I would tear my heart out and throw it away if it was possible," she says. Wishful thinking.

By contrast, Gray Powell tries to win the audience over with volubly love-sick Valentine, and it backfires a bit. His character is just one of many in Shaw's oeuvre that get (what Sondheim called) the "Tell-me-that-you-love-me-oh-you-did-I-gotta-run-now" blues – and perhaps I'm just exhausted by that conceit, presented uncritically. A lack of chemistry between him and Course's Gloria doesn't help matters.

As Mrs. Clandon, too, Tara Rosling is oddly out of focus – perhaps because the twins dominate any scene they're in. Dzialoszynski and Jackman-Torkoff are cast as comically unidentical, as twins often are in The Comedy of Errors or Twelfth Night these days: One is short, the other tall; one white, the other black.

A moment or two where they stop snapping selfies and genuinely grapple with the emotions of reuniting their estranged father might have made them less, well, annoying.

But their endlessly over-the-top antics are, instead, a bit like the nitrous oxide that Valentine charges an extra five shillings for: It makes you giddy at first, but soon enough you stop feeling anything. Aside from the interactions between McManus and Course, the same might be said about Mezon's entire production. "C'est la vie," say the old folks.

You Never Can Tell continues to Oct. 25. Visit shawfest.com for tickets and times.

You Never Can Tell continues to Oct. 25. Visit shawfest.com for tickets and times